JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: Meet Russell Proctor, better-known as R.P., an engaging 26-year-old self-described “ginger head” who could have been a stand-up comic.

RUSSELL PROCTOR: Dang it, dang it, no. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Reset.

VALENTE: But the topics he’ll discuss with these ninth graders over the next five days are serious: what it means to be a man, the value of monogamous relationships, the danger of sexually transmitted diseases, how to avoid bad dating relationships, how to grow in self-esteem and treat others with respect.

R.P. is part of a private organization called Healthy Visions that tries to give teenagers the tools to make healthier life choices during the critical high school years. The hallmark of Healthy Visions is presenting information in an amusing, entertaining way. Although Healthy Visions reflects the Christian values of its founder and staff, it has been welcomed into 26 schools in Ohio and northern Kentucky, most of them public.

Healthy Visions is based on the premise that teens can learn the decision-making skills that can help them connect their actions with consequences. Healthy Visions’ charismatic young counselors, or presenters, as they like to be called, talk frankly about sex, STDs, date rape, bullying, and teen suicide—topics many public school teachers feel ill-equipped to address.

Carole Adlard began Healthy Visions as a counseling program for pregnant teens but quickly realized students needed more.

CAROLE ADLARD (Founder, Healthy Visions): One of the facts that broke my heart was seeing so many students who felt hopeless. They were in bad home situations, they were being bullied in schools, they had been sexually abused. You could see the lack of light in their eyes, and we wanted to offer them hope.

RUSSELL PROCTOR: Day 1 I talk about healthy self-image. With girls it’s much more about body image: Hey, listen, you don’t have to be a size 2. You’re a beautiful girl no matter what size you are, no matter how much make-up you wear. And then I try to teach the guys what it means to be a man, because our society kind of teaches, okay, men need to hook up with girls, men need to drink. Day 2 we talk about Facebook, technology, cell phones, how to be smart with that stuff. Day 3 we talk about sex, the physical side, how people are connected, how STDs spread, kind of the nuts and bolts of sex. Day 4 we talk about healthy dating relationships. And then Day 5 we talk about the emotional side of sex, like how it’s going to affect your heart, your mind, your connecting to people. And then I wrap up with what are you going to do now? I’m very real to the point of being pretty blunt about what I say, but kids respect that.

VALENTE: Proctor is especially frank also about his own struggles.

PROCTOR: I got made fun of a lot, very depressed, suicidal thoughts a lot. I can feel that tense high school feeling all over again, and I can just relate to these kids on that level because I’ve lived through it and have never forgotten that.

VALENTE: Proctor says he drank heavily in high school and was into the sexual hook-up culture. Those experiences left him numb. He tells students he is in a serious relationship now and that he and his girlfriend have decided to wait until they are married to have sex.

PROCTOR: I can tell stories about hey, I’ve been waiting for this long, this many years for sex. And they go, oh, okay. And I treat my girlfriend like this. Oh, okay, I believe him. Oh, okay, and when kids see you buying into it, they buy into it too.

HEATHER CAMPBELL (Teacher): The guys from Healthy Visions have been a blessing to us. They really reach kids in a way that I as a teacher I’m not able to. They’re younger and the kids relate to them better. And long after they’re gone they continue to come up in the kids’ conversations and writings.

VALENTE: No definitive study has been done to measure Healthy Visions’ impact. But the organization recently surveyed 164 students who had completed its classes. Ninety-five percent said it changed the way they look at relationships and sex. Seventy-seven percent said it improved their self-esteem, and 64 percent said it made them more aware of the dangers of alcohol and drugs.

KRISTEN LOWE (Student): It changed the way I look at myself. I respect myself more and now, like I don’t really care what other people say. Like I feel that I’m beautiful in my own way and I let it really, like, it opened a new door for me and I feel different about myself.

KAREEM AL-SHAKIR (Student): Seeing Healthy Visions, it changed how you should act in relationships and how you shouldn’t act and what’s healthy and what’s not healthy. Like to try and be controlling and stuff, that’s unhealthy.

EMILY KOZEL (Student): Some teachers, they just have that voice that you don’t want to listen to sometimes. And I mean, when R.P. comes into class and he, you know, puts his leg up on the table and starts, you know, talking about how he’s like a ginger and all of his family stuff in the first five minutes of class, I think it just hooks everybody in to want to listen to him.

VALENTE: Emily Kozel is a sophomore in suburban Milford, Ohio. She wrote this letter to R.P. after he helped her cope with bullies at her school and a suicide attempt by her best friend.

KOZEL (reading): Before he came along, I had very low self-esteem. I always thought that I was considered a piece of junk. He has taught me to understand that I am beautiful just the way I am, no matter what I look like. He helped me to overcome being bullied and helped me to realize that I need to help those around me. I have not thought about suicide in over a year-and-a-half.

VALENTE: After taking Healthy Visions classes, Allison Herndon, a tenth grader from Kings Mills, Ohio, started a Facebook support page for girls called “Beauty Within Me.” The page quickly gained 190 friends.

ALLISON HERNDON: A lot of people have problems at home, so they write about that. Insecurity is a big thing on there. People write about how they don’t feel pretty, and they have a hard time adjusting to it, and they think that other people don’t like them.

CHUCK LAFATA (Principal, Redding High School): First time I sat in on a Healthy Visions presentation in health class, I thought, holy cow! I don’t know how this is going to go over. Not one, not one complaint from teachers, parents, or students.

PROCTOR: Sex, sex, sex…

LYNN TEUSCHLER (Parent): For me as a parent, I’m bombarded. I constantly feel like I’m alone in messaging to the kids, you know, about chastity and waiting and all the dangers of the culture today. And I finally felt like I had back up.

VALENTE: Some people would say this kind of thing doesn’t really belong in the public schools. This is the role of the parent. This is the role of the family.

TEUSCHLER: Well, they have sex ed in the public schools already, and in my opinion they’re pushing sex down the throats of children whether or not the parents like it or not. Why can’t they get a counterbalance and have chastity, you know, promote abstinence?

VALENTE: How can you show that you’re not pushing any particular religion or religious belief?

ADLARD: What we’re teaching is the basic human premise that you’re created, that you’re valuable, that you’re lovable, and that you have a purpose. That’s what we teach. And those are intrinsic to our humanity.

PROCTOR: I’m taking the message of Jesus to people. I just can’t mention his name. So like when I talk about, hey, you’re forgiven for your past and I don’t hold any of it against you. For a lot of kids, that’s a new message, but that’s actually an old message. That’s a Jesus message.

VALENTE: Once classes are over, students can keep in touch with R.P. and other Healthy Visions staff through Facebook. Cases involving abuse or more serious psychological problems are referred to professional counselors.

(speaking to Russell Proctor): How do you find the inner strength to do this work week after week?

PROCTOR: Like sometimes on a Monday, it will be hard for me. I’ll think, man, another week, this is going to be intense. But then you watch as the week goes on, and this kid who starts out as a lump of clay, who thinks maybe I’m not that pretty, maybe I’m not that valuable, and then you watch as the week goes on, and they just blossom. Every time I see that that’s why I do this job.

VALENTE: Proctor and the Healthy Visions staff are at work on a curriculum guide that can be downloaded online. They hope to one day spread their message of healthy choices to high schools across the country.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Judy Valente in Cincinnati.

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2012/06/thumb01-healthyvisions.jpgA nonprofit agency in Greater Cincinnati tries to guide young people in their decision-making about sexuality, dating, drugs, social media, and more.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2012/06/15/june-15-2012-healthy-visions/11254/feed/5abstinence,dating,Decision-making,self-esteem,sex education,social media,teenage pregnancy,teensA nonprofit agency in Greater Cincinnati tries to guide young people in their decision-making about sexuality, dating, drugs, social media, and more.A nonprofit agency in Greater Cincinnati tries to guide young people in their decision-making about sexuality, dating, drugs, social media, and more.Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyno8:16 Religious Right and Health Policyhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2006/06/30/june-30-2006-religious-right-and-health-policy/11801/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2006/06/30/june-30-2006-religious-right-and-health-policy/11801/#commentsFri, 30 Jun 2006 17:18:44 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=11801More →

LUCKY SEVERSON, guest anchor: This week a government advisory committee recommended that 11- and 12-year-old girls be routinely vaccinated against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer. Scientists say the vaccine is most effective when it’s administered to girls before they become sexually active. The committee’s recommendations are usually accepted by federal health agencies. But when premarital sex is involved, the recommendations have increasingly been caught between science, politics and religion.

Mary Helen Ramos has cervical cancer. She’s very concerned that her 11-year-old daughter Alexis will get the same disease.

MARY HELEN RAMOS: Having me diagnosed with cervical cancer, of course it raises her chances. And it’s important to me that my daughter is protected.

SEVERSON: But now, thanks to a pharmaceutical breakthrough, Mary Helen no longer needs to worry about her daughter. Recently, the FDA approved a new vaccine that prevents most cervical cancers. Rarely has a new drug received such positive reviews.

SEVERSON: Before becoming an advisor to the CDC, Dr. Reginald Finger was employed by the Christian right organization Focus on the Family.

Dr. REGINALD FINGER (Centers for Disease Control): The studies have shown that there are almost no failures for the vaccine. They’re – they’re doing very well.

Dr. Reginald Finger

SEVERSON: The drug, called Gardasil, protects women against the most common sexually transmitted disease in the U.S. – the human papillomavirus, also known as HPV. By protecting against HPV infections, the vaccine will in effect prevent 70 percent of cervical cancers. Many in the medical community say the vaccine should be mandatory for all prepubescent girls. They want it required by schools just like vaccinations are now for measles or mumps. But that’s a problem for those in the Christian right, like the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg.

PETER SPRIGG (Family Research Council): Well, we would oppose imposing a school mandate with respect to this vaccine. We believe that there is a fundamental principle that parents have the primary responsibility and decision-making power with respect to the health of their children. We would be concerned if this were administered with a message that, “Hey, this is a shot that makes it safe for you to have sex.”

SEVERSON: In public and behind the scenes, the Bush Administration and its core supporters have waged a fierce battle against anything that might counter their abstinence until marriage message. The divide between the religious right and science on this and other issues has caused an unprecedented tension. Over 9,500 scientists, including Nobel Laureates, have signed a statement accusing the Administration of suppressing and misrepresenting scientific information for political purposes.

Dr. W. David Hager

Dr. W. DAVID HAGER (Director of Obstetrics Training, University of Kentucky and Former Advisor, FDA): I would disagree with that, but they’re entitled to their opinion.

SEVERSON: Dr. David Hager is director of obstetrics training at the University of Kentucky and a former advisor to the FDA. He is also a well-known Christian conservative.

Dr. HAGER: They feel that religion and those who espouse religion [are] overwhelming scientific information. I happen to disagree with that. I believe that it’s possible for a person of faith to also be a person of science.

Pastor ED AINSWORTH (talking to class): And I want to tell you something 6th-graders, this is not fear, it’s fact.

SEVERSON: Sex education classes have almost always taught abstinence along with information about contraceptives. Many religious conservatives think the better message is abstinence-only and supporting that. The government this year will spend $182 million on abstinence-only programs. In many schools, it’s the only sex education offered. The message: the only safe sex is no sex.

Ed Ainsworth

Pastor AINSWORTH (talking to class): …that if you have sex outside marriage, it will cost you.

Dr. FINGER: Well, I feel like abstinence-only is the correct approach for the school-based setting and for the church-based setting in this country. I believe that, all things taken together, the risks of a mixed-approach outweigh the benefits.

SEVERSON: But Dr. Finger’s views on abstinence-only represent those of only a small minority of medical professionals. Francesca Grifo heads the Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

FRANCESCA GRIFO (Integrity Program, Union of Concerned Scientists): One recent study looking at abstinence-only education involved 14,000 teenagers, and out of that study came a very saddening result, which is that, in fact, when we only tell them about abstinence, we end up with more sexual activity rather than less.

Pastor AINSWORTH (talking to class): So is a condom safe sex? No.

Susan Wood

SUSAN WOOD (Former FDA Official): It’s telling young people who don’t have other sources of information that why bother with contraception? It doesn’t work. And those kind of messages, in fact, are dangerous.

SEVERSON: Susan Wood is a former top official at the FDA who accuses the Administration of disregarding scientific and medical evidence.

Ms. WOOD: Unfortunately, I do think some of the information that confuses people – information that is given out by different organizations – is, in fact, deliberately inaccurate.

SEVERSON: An example, she says, was a statement put on the National Cancer Institute Web site in 2002 suggesting a link between breast cancer and women who have abortions.

Ms. WOOD: This caused a bit of a hue and cry, and the National Cancer Institute convened a workshop and quickly put the correct information back up.

SEVERSON: The correct information, she says, is that there is no connection between abortion and breast cancer. But some states, by law, are still publishing the erroneous information.

Ms. WOOD: We have seen the states pass laws which require this inaccurate information to be given to women who are seeking abortions – apparently solely for the purpose of discouraging them from making that decision.

SEVERSON: Susan Wood resigned in protest after the FDA’s decision in 2005 to postpone yet again the over-the-counter sale of Plan B, also known as the morning-after pill, which is effective only if taken within 72 hours. At the time, Dr. Hager was on the advisory committee and was one of three out of 24 on the committee who opposed the sale.

Dr. HAGER: I did not feel that we had adequate information at that time which I had requested to let us know what the effect on younger adolescents, adolescents in general, would be as far as access to medical care if Plan B went over the counter.

SEVERSON: Plan B has been legally available by prescription in the U.S. since 1999. Over the years, each panel investigating its safety and effectiveness has recommended it be sold over the counter, just as it’s been in Europe for many years. Each time the recommendation has not been acted upon, which is highly unusual.

Ms. WOOD: What’s really important to remember in the case of Plan B emergency contraception is there’s really no safety question.

SEVERSON: The science versus religion debate has also become personal. The letter signed by almost 10,000 scientists accuses the religious right of putting out information that is deliberately misleading. Some on the right, such as Dr. David Hager, charge that religious faith is under attack.

Francesca Grifo

Dr. HAGER: Oh, I think that there is a battle between people who are people of faith and those who are not. I think there’s an attempt to discredit anyone who has faith and also indicates that they are a person of science or even intelligent.

Ms. GRIFO: When we take a lot of different information from a lot of different places and put it out into the policy arena, that’s a great thing. That’s part of democracy. But when we use science, we want to make sure that that science is, in fact, unaltered, unadulterated, uncensored, unmanipulated, not politicized.

Dr. FINGER: This is an example of values, science and politics all interacting to make policy. I think it’s a healthy process. This is America.

ALEXIS: I just take care of her – whatever she needs. If she needs anything for me to do, I’ll do it for her. I don’t mind.

SEVERSON: She is comforted knowing her daughter Alexis will be inoculated with the HPV drug. In the U. S. alone, it is expected to save 3,000 to 4,000 lives each year.

/wnet/religionandethics/files/2006/06/religiousright-healthpolicy-thumb.jpgA government advisory committee recommended that 11- and 12-year-old girls be routinely vaccinated against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer. The vaccine is most effective when it’s administered to girls before they become sexually active. But with the potential for premarital sex involved, the recommendation has been caught between science, politics and religion.

]]>Read more of Lucky Severson’s interview with the Reverend Eugene Rivers in Boston, Massachusetts:

I have been working on issues of public safety and violence, and by implication black family issues, for the last 25 years, intensely focused on that. And over the last 25 years I have seen the complete unraveling of what has been understood for all of our history in this society to be the black family. I’ve seen phenomenally high divorce rates among black families, regardless of class, even when we control for socioeconomic difference. I’ve seen extraordinary levels, as a result, of father absence, which has contributed to crime and higher incarceration rates among young children who did not have the benefit of a two-parent household. It has been observation over many years, as well as the intellectual crisis within the black community with regard to the family. We saw it in 1965 with the Moynihan report, where there was a great deal of denial. Moynihan was labeled a racist, and the black community just continued to unravel. So here we are 40 years after the Moynihan report, and the black community is in a state of crisis.

We have a generation of young people who buy what they want and beg for what they need and who in many cases, based on current labor market demands, would be obsolete for slavery, as we see China become an increasingly powerful competitor on the global market with the United States. It’s a confluence of factors that have brought us to the conclusion that there needs to be a forthright, articulate, clear discussion [about black families]. Not that everyone agrees. People will disagree about what family is, and that’s okay, but at least there needs to be a rational discussion to facilitate some new policy conversations 40 years after Moynihan.

Father absence is the single most important independent variable affecting or correlated with incarceration rates for young males or some form of criminal justice supervision. So you have this issue of father absence contributing to, being a variable in, as a predictor of whether or not a young black male gets involved in the criminal justice system. Well, it seems to me that if there is a variable, that if it’s not causal but is correlated with incarceration patterns and predictions, we should be having a discussion about how do we keep fathers in families when you have got these divorce rates, when we look at teen pregnancy.

It has been greatly underestimated — the role of fathers in contributing to the stability of girls. Every girl needs a daddy. The daddy is the first guy in a girl’s life who tells the daughter she is beautiful. There are some very, very basic things that aren’t nuclear physics that have to do with the socialization and rearing of our children.

We have higher pregnancy rates. We have phenomenally high sexually transmitted disease rates that are so terrible that you don’t have any public discussions of it because most good liberals in traditional black leadership don’t want stereotypes being reinforced. So we don’t discuss the fact that we have got these phenomenal problems that are creating in some instances a biological underclass. This is absolutely terrifying.

My wife specializes in math education, and after 20 years of doing community organizing she says the single most important factor shaping the academic achievement of the child is the family and the culture produced by the family. It is not per capita expenditures on public schools; it’s about what families do with their children. Stable families produce better, higher-achieving students than families that are broken. By every possible sociological indicator that we can use, if there’s not some causal relationship, the correlation is almost one to one.

Part of it, I think, has to do with labor markets. William Julius Wilson talked about this 30 years ago in his studies on black unemployment trends and patterns in the black community. Another piece is culture. What kind of culture are the young people raised in? It was very difficult to talk about culture because Bill Ryan in BLAMING THE VICTIM said that if we talk about culture within the context of poverty and race, we are blaming the victim. Well, no. Another factor that contributes to this instability and nonperformance across these indicators is that a stable black family can create the appropriate culture of achievement, of discipline, of gratification deferral, which are the basic things that any civilization in any society needs to rear healthy children that become functional adults.

The welfare system has contributed. It was the development of a welfare system that penalized women for having fathers in the household that here again promoted, directly or indirectly, a culture of poverty and encouraged the kind of bad habits that do not lend themselves to helping young people become successful participants in the society.

In my judgment, there are some unresolved issues around the roles and images of black males as providers, performers, producers that go back to slavery and the breakup of the family. We had a brief period where it was slightly more stabilized. But the issue of familial stability — we saw that in the Moynihan report, in the scholarship of E. Franklin Frazier, W.E.B. DuBois, and a whole range of scholars that said, “Look, there are some factors that have to be corrected for that are intergenerational, and we have got to focus on those in a very coherent way.”

Part of what I see contributing to this was a major cultural shift. You know, the liberalization of sex, you know, during the ’60s and early ’70s created an environment where sex was disconnected from commitment, and that was viewed as progressive. The recreational sexual practices of the elite, who could engage in sexual and pharmacological experimentation, when it filtered down to the poor had absolutely catastrophic consequences.

Black churches are now maintaining as much order as they can for the people whose lives they directly impact. The incidence of divorce for regular church-attending communicants, right, is dramatically lower, just much, much lower than those that are non-church attending. Why hasn’t the black church had a greater influence? If there are such phenomenally high levels of religious participation on the part of the black community, why hasn’t this filtered down? Well, I think there are a couple of factors. One is the black church has not successfully engaged the culture. We live in a very different culture. Hip-hop, which is middle-range pornography, is having a very corrosive effect upon growing numbers of young black people, and the church has not successfully engaged that culture. So you have this generational disconnect where an increasingly older baby-booming black church-attending population, which is largely middle-class, is disconnected from an increasingly significant black underclass that is disconnected from the churches as well as the black middle class, who should play some socializing role in the lives of the poor. But as a result of the residential resegregation of the black poor as a function of the black middle class moving out and commuting into churches, we have a major cultural crisis.

Black preachers have their own sex problems. And the issue of sexual fidelity and what it takes to produce a culture of sexual fidelity has to begin in the church. The way one arrests the moral disorder of the black community is to correct the moral disorder within the black church. The black leadership, the black church must exhibit and model the kind of moral culture and provide some empirical evidence that legitimates the moral discourse around fidelity, simply from a functional standpoint. Forget the morality; it is simply more functional to be faithful to the mother of your children so that the children [are] socialized to believe that relationships have integrity, you know, relationships are sacred. And as a result, sex should not be disconnected from commitment or integrity, and that’s a challenge before the black church.

In some cases we have highly visible black clergy, whose names are too well known for me to mention, who have been caught in sexually compromised situations where there was a very public expression of infidelity that was humiliating for the wife and family and was the source of a significant scandal in the black community. Now those kinds of events, which are highly visual, tend to be demoralizing, because in many cases you have got young people, you have got young women who are thinking about marriage and companionship and [they] believe increasingly that there is no possibility of having a trusting relationship of permanence over the long term. And so the black churches — we have not done enough to model, walk the talk, you know, of fidelity and integrity. And it is a spiritual issue, it is a political issue, it is a cultural issue.

Part of the problem is that the black church, not unlike many other churches, has not had a coherent theology of sexuality that would deal with the realities, the struggles, the difficulties of sex. It’s not that the black church is actually homophobic. As I told a gay friend of mine, homophobia — whatever that means — is a symptom of a deeper issue, which is the black church has not dealt with the question of sex in a forthright way. There is not a systematic theology of human sexuality, of marriage, of fidelity. The black church has failed to present that and project that. As a result, many of the problems the black community has must be laid at the foot of the church.

Some churches normalize the abnormal. The traditional understanding for the last 2,000 years within the Eastern and Western church of what constituted a normative understanding of marriage has been the subject or the object of considerable debate recently. Our view is that there needs to be a philosophically coherent defense and exposition of the normative understanding that is civil, that is courteous, but that is clear. So that if there is debate or dissent, we can have that discussion, and the object of our statement was to provoke that discussion at a more intellectually serious level. So that we weren’t name-calling, it wasn’t PC rhetoric back and forth. You’ve got right-wing cuckoo rhetoric; you got left-wing cuckoo rhetoric. Pick your poison. We can go from Lynchburg, Virginia to San Francisco and get flip sides of the same coin. What we were calling for was for the black community, for Cornel West, for Michael Dyson, our celebrity intelligentsia, our theologians to be engaged in a serious discussion around the issue.

If there is anybody that does need the traditional family, it’s the black community. We don’t presume to tell white people what to do. What we do know is that in the black community we are completely off the hook with a wire cut. In the black community we have gone from “Lift every voice and sing” to “booty-popping bootylisciouness,” where pornography is mainstreamed. That is in part a function of the failure of black men to respectfully and lovingly support black women, the mothers of their children. I do know this: black men who father children need to be there to support the mothers with whom they had the child so that child can come up healthy, and that is my definition of a family. I father a child with a woman, I am morally obligated to partner with that woman in the rearing of that child.

Increasingly, the black church is going to be picking up on this issue, because they simply can’t avoid it. Once it becomes more public what the sexually transmitted disease rates are for black teenage girls, or how disproportionately the AIDS epidemic has impacted black people, there is going to be a national come-to-Jesus discussion with black churches about how we have failed to engage the issue.

The language, the apparel, the sexually explicit nature of public conversation on a bus on the part of 12-, 13-, 14-year-old girls is unbelievable. Whites don’t have the sexually transmitted disease rates that blacks have. Whites don’t have the level of disorganization and poverty that we saw in evidence with Hurricane Katrina. Whites have a level of organization. If the statistics that exist for blacks existed for whites, there would be a national summit every week on how to save our children.

If the infection HIV rates for black girls continue to grow, they in turn produce HIV fetally infected infants. In a country with no national health care system, new kinds of discussions around who deserves to receive health care come into play.

Liberals have been intellectually incoherent for 30 years. That’s one of the reasons they continue to lose in terms of political power. The secular liberals and to some extent religious liberals have been intellectually incoherent. They say all the politically correct things, but there are no solutions. Now I’m not saying that the conservatives have solutions. The major contribution to the national conversation on the part of political conservatives is to criticize liberals, which takes absolutely no imagination. It’s not as though they have said anything that produces new ideas. They simply say that the idiot was an idiot, which doesn’t take us anywhere.

What Bill Bennett said was unfortunate, and the only thing more unfortunate than what he said was his failure to apologize for it and the attitude he exhibited. Bill Bennett should have said it was an error of the lip and not the heart. But unfortunately, for reasons that are inexplicable to me, he only made a bad situation worse, by failing to simply say, “What I said was not intended as it came out, I apologize to anyone offended, I’m a humble person and so I apologize,” which is the only appropriate response regardless of what the intent was.

White male ex-offenders have, in a number of cities, a better chance of getting employment than college-educated black males. That’s still true. I’m not going to exaggerate the significance of that because I don’t want to make excuses. There are issues of job training, labor markets, job availability, and those issues have to be addressed. And then there are issues of culture. We are producing a generation of young black males who don’t know how to conduct themselves in a job interview, who come in trying to looking like a rapper when what was required was a shirt and a tie and English at least as a second language, and it is the failure on our part to properly resocialize these young people. In other words, who was right was Bill Cosby. Cosby had it right, notwithstanding Michael Dyson’s marginally useful critique.

The only institution that has the capacity and better deal with it are the black churches working in collaboration with other community-based agencies. So the Urban League, the NAACP, the Untied Negro Women’s Association — all of those agencies have to be collaborating with black churches to engage this issue.

One of the things that is perhaps most disturbing is that the divorce rate for blacks, the out-of-wedlock births actually travel up and down the class ladder. Black middle-class people have a divorce rate that exceeds the national average. It is twice the national average for middle-class people. So whatever socioeconomic strata you go to, we still have this crisis, so it runs throughout the entire community.

One cannot overemphasize how corrosive the popular culture has been. I mean, its sewage. It’s sewage. You can’t build healthy young people with healthy attitudes. Just take males. It’s misogynistic. Where are the feminists when I need them? They should be all over this. You’ve got these absolutely reprehensible, misogynistic lyrics. Then the high liberals come out and say First Amendment rights for the folks who want to promote pedophilia and misogyny, except when it comes to right-wingers who are outraged by this stuff, because they don’t have First Amendment rights. They are cavepeople; we don’t want to hear from them.

Blacks have the highest church attending rates probably of any group in the society. Pew and Gallup data seem to indicate that’s the case. So why is it that we have such a dramatic breakdown culturally, behaviorally? There are a couple of things going on. One is many people do not have any sense of how pervasive and powerful the culture industries are in terms of saturating the public mind with stuff that’s pornographic, that gets targeted early. So, for example, black church folk go to church, let’s say, twice a week. They watch more television than any other group. Nobody sits in front of the tube and looks at more garbage more hours of the day than the black community. No other group sits in front of BET or some other, MTV, looking at pornographic video culture than blacks. We sit up and watch that stuff ’round the clock. Now let’s say 20 hours a week of television, which is probably low, versus two hours on Sunday. Who wins? We undo a lot of what we learned on Sunday with the next 20 hours of absolutely disgusting programming that we have our children watch because the television is a babysitter. It’s amazing. Add to that the radio music. Then in addition to television we’ve got “booty-popping bootylicious back that thang up” lyrics on the radio. So we really have a very challenging cultural crisis for which the church has not really developed a thoughtful strategy. The average age of the average black clergyman has got to be in the 50s. He is competing with a rapper or a producer who is 22.

The black preacher, ironically, is still the leading, stabilizing role model in the black community, even with everything that we’ve said about what the black church does not do. The black church is now sort of morphing into the de facto government for black America. If we got every one of the 65,000 black churches that exist in the United States to carry 300 times their load — even if they did that, they would be less than a drop in the bucket for 35 million black people in the United States.

There has to be a new conversation. There have got to be new strategic partnerships, and the black community across the board has to make the decision that we are going to own our stuff. We are going to own sex; we are going to own crime; we are going to own the programmatic piece of developing the kinds of comprehensive programs in collaboration with the public sector and the private sector to address the problem. At the end of the day, black people have to take the moral responsibility for themselves.

I have heard no one call me a racist. Folks would like to say I was too conservative, but that would be difficult to sustain because I’m a Democrat. On the economy I’m a liberal. Estate taxes — bad. Iraq war — bad. Should they get out? There should be an exit strategy. Was it a mistake? Absolutely. Were there weapons of mass destruction? I’m still waiting. So on any number of issues, on war and peace, bread-and-butter issues, I would be a liberal unquestionably, which is right at the center of the black church tradition. The overwhelming majority of black church people are Democrats. The overwhelming majority of black people voted for Kerry, not because they were thrilled about it. The overwhelming majority of black people on cultural and social issues were conservatives [and] on bread-and-butter, economic, peace and justice issues were liberals.

We have come to the end of a cycle. The kind of high paleo-liberal integrationist policy, politics, and rhetoric are over. It’s over. Intellectually there’s no traction. Politically there’s no traction. Nobody’s going to put any money behind it. Even the liberals who are exhausted say they were all bad ideas. We hate the Republicans, but we can’t go back to this other stuff. Aside from which, we don’t know what to do in terms of black leadership because none of the established recognized brand names have any real political traction in the black community. Obama is a rock star. He’s gorgeous, articulate, good liberal, end of story. He’s a good liberal, and as long as he is able to keep that together he will be in the Senate. He will not probably in our lifetime be President of the United States. That’s not going to happen.

Read more of Lucky Severson’s interview with the Reverend Eugene Rivers in Boston, Massachusetts.

]]>Read more of Betty Rollin’s interview on religion, parenting and the RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY poll on Faith and Family in America with Professor Brad Wilcox:

For many parents, religion is a key source for the moral formation of their kids. It enables them to give their kids a sense of moral direction in this world, and that applies across the board. More conservative religious parents, be they Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, or whatnot, tend to be more invested in parenting, in part because they want to convey their faith to their children, but also in part because they are worried about a culture that they see as debased and debasing. They want to protect their kids from that culture. Those are two key points that I see in my work on religion and parenting. Parents across the religious and ideological spectrum see religion as a key source of moral direction for their kids. It’s also why we see that the highest level of [church] attendance for adults is for folks, particularly men, who are married with kids. Once their kids are at a certain age, between six and 12, they want to get involved with a local church or synagogue and get their kids integrated into the life of that congregation.

What we find in general is that parents who are more religious and are also affectionate and firm with their kids — it is both their religiosity as parents … [and] their parenting style — that these two things when they work in concert are likely to ensure that they will transmit the faith that they have to their children. If they are very religious themselves, and if they are affectionate with their kids, and also if they are firm — if they have not an overly strict but a firm approach to discipline — they are more likely to convey their faith to their children.

We know, for instance, that children from evangelical homes are more likely to remain in that tradition, about 80 percent of kids from those homes. And in mainline Protestant traditions it’s closer to 60 percent. A big part of that difference is the difference in the faith. Evangelical parents tend to have a stronger faith, which then makes their kids more likely to abide in that faith. Likewise, about 75 percent of Catholic kids would persist in the faith of their parents. I don’t have numbers for Jewish and Muslim children.

Parents who are too strict with their kids, who are authoritarian parents, are more likely to see their children rebel, both with respect to their moral beliefs as well as their religious beliefs. There is a kind of continuum. Parents who are too permissive are going to see their kids go off, and parents who are too strict are also going to see their kids leave the faith. There is this dynamic, particularly when it comes to issues of control and discipline. Parents who give their kids some latitude but not too much are more likely to see their kids stick with the faith.

There is a new survey that was conducted out of the University of North Carolina which shows that kids who are more religious are less likely to use drugs, to abuse alcohol. They are less likely to be delinquent. They are less likely to be depressed. So there is an association between weekly religious practice and also having a strong religious self-identity and being less likely to fall into social trouble and also less likely to experience psychological distress.

The RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY poll indicates — and this goes to the issue of more traditional religious parents being more concerned about the broader culture — that about half of evangelical Protestant and traditional Catholic parents are concerned about sex and violence in popular culture, and this compares to about a third of parents of other traditions and secular parents. There clearly is this gap between the more traditional and less traditional religious parents when it comes to their concern about our popular culture. That’s a very interesting finding for the R & E poll.

Another interesting finding from the poll is that parents in traditional families, that is, married parents with kids, are much less worried about their kids than parents in single-parent or nontraditional families. So there is something about that family structure that makes the more traditional parents less worried about the schools their kids are in, the values their kids are being exposed to. They are also slightly less worried about transmitting their faith to their kids — though that’s a smaller effect there.

The poll suggests that parents who are in more traditional families are less worried about their kids, probably in part because they are more integrated into their religious communities. Parents whose kids are more religious are likely to see their kids do slightly better in school, and also to see their kids much less likely to be involved with alcohol and drugs, to be delinquent or to experience psychological distress — things like depression, for instance. It lasts at least into young adulthood. With anything like this there is always a question of persistence. Kids who persist in a religious faith will see these effects continue into their lives. But kids who drift away from religious practice over five or 10 or 15 years are going to be less likely to experience the benefits of religious practice.

Particularly among more moderate and liberal religious parents, one of their key concerns, their key motivations in bringing their kids to church, synagogue, or even mosque is to give their kids some religious and moral formation that they hope will protect their children. Whereas for the more traditional or devout religious parents, a key motivation for them is also, of course, to really give their kids a strong faith.

I think it’s always been the case that religion has always been a key part of a parent’s tool kit. But I think there is a new concern, particularly among the more traditional parents, about the nature of popular culture in our society, and that concern motivates them to be even more dedicated parents and to do more to get their kids engaged with their faith. More traditional parents also recognize that other institutions, schools, and the popular culture are less likely to be supportive of their faith, and so there’s more of a sense on their part that they have to step up and take more responsibility for the transmission of their faith, because other institutions are going to be less likely to do the job for them. The RELIGION & ETHICS survey, for example, finds that 6 percent of American parents are home schooling. That’s actually the highest number that I’ve seen in these kinds of surveys. It suggests to me that one of the reasons, among others, that these parents are home schooling is to provide a sense of their faith and their moral beliefs to their kids.

The poll also indicates that about a third of interfaith families think their kids will have the faith that they do, and that compares to about half of parents who share the same faith. One clear take-away here is that parents, I think accurately, recognize that they are more likely to transmit their faith if they share that faith with one another, and they are less likely, of course, to transmit a faith to their kids if they don’t share the same faith.

What tends to happen in interfaith families is that the parent who is more religious tends to be in the driver’s seat with respect to things like holidays and is the one who tends to influence the children more when it comes to their own faith. We also know that interfaith families do experience more tension around faith for obvious reasons, and they are more likely to experience marital distress and divorce. We know that kids from interfaith families are more likely to become secular as they enter young adulthood. As with anything, whether it is politics or religion, when there are clear differences between parents, that can be a source for tension and also a source for more questioning on the part of kids.

The big issue is whether or not the kids [in interfaith families] get integrated into a religious congregation, be it Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, whatever. If they do, they are less likely, just like other kids, to experience things like delinquency and depression. The key challenge to interfaith families is to figure out whether or not they can integrate their child into a particular congregation.

It certainly is the case that children from interfaith families are kind of walking between two worlds. In a Jewish-Christian family, they are walking between Passover and Easter, or between Hanukkah and Christmas, and they are trying to negotiate these two different traditions, these two different sets of holidays and rituals, and it certainly can lead to confusion and a lot of questioning of their own religious identity. Insofar as it makes them less likely to be religious both as teenagers and as young adults, there are some risks like delinquency and depression. On the positive end of the ledger, I would say that these kids tend to think for themselves more than other children and they tend to have a better sense of how different traditions relate to one another or don’t. They are more cosmopolitan. They would be more tolerant, typically.

According to the poll, almost two thirds of parents indicate that they think their kids should be free to choose their own religious faith. A large percentage of parents really want their kids to make the choice for themselves. Of course, they also hope that their kids will pick the faith that they have as parents. There is an interesting dynamic here — on the one hand, a high respect for the child’s autonomy to do as they please when it comes to their religious faith as young adults. At the same time, there is a hope on the part of many parents that they will pick the faith that they were raised in.

Parents who are regular churchgoers, regular mosquegoers — those parents are more engaged with their kids in one-on-one activities. That’s common across traditions. But there are important distinctions. For instance, when it comes to rules, evangelical and fundamentalist parents are much more likely to have a lot of rules for their kids, whereas Jewish parents are much less likely to have a lot of rules for their kids. We also find for Orthodox Jewish parents, and I think this would probably be true for Muslim parents, that [they] tend to know almost all the friends of their children, almost all of their kids’ friends’ parents. There’s a high level of what we call intergenerational closure. The Orthodox Jewish parents are much more likely to basically know who their kids are hanging out with, and this is true to a certain extent of all parents who attend services on a weekly basis. But it’s particularly true for Jewish parents and, I suspect, true also for the Muslim parents.

In part it’s the religious beliefs themselves that lead to good results — people want to follow the Ten Commandments. I think there’s also a sense that kids get that there is kind of a moral golden rule out there and that rule is reinforced by their own tradition, and they want to follow that rule. But I wouldn’t want to underestimate the importance of social networks, that is, who the kids are hanging out with. If they are involved in a church, a synagogue, or a mosque, they are hanging out with a group of kids who are getting certain messages about the moral life from their parents, from their parents’ friends, and from a youth minister, and as a consequence they are going to be more likely to go with that crowd as a opposed to a crowd that might be involved in less savory activities.

I think there is some association between religious rituals during the day and behavior during the day. Any kind of activity that is done throughout the day will keep children and adults, for that matter, more mindful of their religious beliefs, and so therefore it probably is true that if you pray more often — obviously if it’s sincere — that you are going to be more attentive to how your behavior does or does not correspond to your religious beliefs.

One of the things about the poll is that it makes it very clear that single parents are more likely to be worried about a variety of things for their children. A Catholic single mother would probably be worrying about making ends meet, would be worried about, perhaps, the popular culture that her children are exposed to, and a variety of other things. Obviously in the Catholic faith there is a strong emphasis on the sacrament of marriage and the idea that marriages should be for life and the best place for kids to be reared is in a married home. So for a single mother who is Catholic, there’s going to be tension between her lived reality and the faith that she holds, the faith that she wants to convey to her kids, and the kids are going to know that, too. For the kids, there is obviously a tension between what they know happened in their family and what they know their faith teaches. Whenever there is a tension between the faith and the lived reality, that can lead to doubt and confusion for kids, and we also know that kids in divorced homes, including Catholic homes, are more likely to leave the faith that they are raised in.

Dads play an important role in passing on — or not — the faith to their kids. If dads are not there, and they are not on the same page with the mother, the kids are much less likely to keep the faith. This is true particularly for divorced kids who can, once again, be walking between two different worlds, their mom’s world and their dad’s world. Oftentimes when a divorce happens, it’s the father who will drop away from the religious faith. That makes the kids more likely to leave the faith themselves.

I think we are seeing more secular parents, more secular kids, but we are also seeing more religiously orthodox or traditional parents and more orthodox or traditional religious kids. What is becoming less common is the mainline Protestant, liberal Catholic, and Reformed Jewish family where religion is a source for moral foundation but not more, because today you have to make a choice. You have to choose to embrace a faith or to drift away or leave a faith. That’s why we are seeing more secular kids and families and more intensely religious kids and families. My sense is that the middle is dropping out.

Our larger society and culture is not as supportive of a kind of generic religious faith as it was 40 years ago. Obviously there is a lot of religion in the news, but in terms of having schools and popular culture all reinforcing a kind of general religious ethos — that’s not our society anymore. I think it’s more likely that you have two choices: go with the flow or stand against that flow and try to teach your kids the faith that you take seriously.

Many parents are concerned about things like sex and violence on television, on the games their kids are playing, and this is more particularly true for the more traditional religious parents, for the evangelical Protestants, the traditional Catholics. Parents are also concerned about the values their kids learn at school, that the teachers convey at school. One of the big concerns parents articulate in the RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY poll, particularly single parents, is making ends meet — a very real financial concern that relates to the whole parenting enterprise. There are a variety of concerns the poll indicates parents are struggling with. Some of these are cultural concerns; some are economic concerns. For single parents, the biggest concern is making ends meet. For the intact families, it is more a concern about the values their kids are exposed to in popular culture, as well as the kinds of things their kids encounter among their peers, at their schools, and the like.

Around the junior or senior year of high school, about age 16 to 17, kids start to move on, and they start to separate themselves from their family and their faith, to a certain extent, particularly in the mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Reform Jewish traditions. On average, separation from their religion is more likely to happen for [kids with] parents who are not intensely religious. It is part of becoming an adult, becoming independent, and so often they will move away from their religious faith, their tradition and then come back to it when they marry and have kids themselves. At early ages, there is a sense of wonder and trust in parents, in religious institutions, and as they enter into their teenage years, there are a lot more questions that follow, and they start to become more independent-minded; they are more likely to question their religious leaders, their parents. Once they become parents themselves, they are more likely to want to convey a sense of faith to their kids, even if they don’t necessarily always feel that faith, but they want to give their kids something to hold onto. We know in general that questioning is a part of ‘most anyone’s religious life, from those who are not particularly religious to those who are strongly religious. Questioning in and of itself is not necessarily going to lead someone to exit a faith.

It is definitely the case, particularly when kids are teenagers, if they are embedded in communities that reinforce and affirm their parents’ faith, they are more likely to keep that faith. If they are in a vibrant church or synagogue or mosque that gives them access to other kids and other adults who take the faith seriously, it’s much easier for the teenagers to maintain the faith that their parents have and to make it their own, because they can see their peers or other adults that they respect living out that faith.

Since the 1960s, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in interfaith marriages in the U.S. So in the last 40 years, there has been a marked increase of interfaith marriages. Kids from interfaith marriages are less likely to be religious themselves as adults. And they are more likely to enter into a new religious tradition that may or may not correspond, of course, to one of their parents’ faiths. Because they are somewhat less religious, they are a little bit more likely to get into trouble or to experience psychological distress. They are also more likely to be independent-minded and to be tolerant.

The poll indicates that most parents want sex education for their kids that incorporates some basic facts about reproduction and about birth control. But it also indicates that most parents value abstinence. They want their kids to value abstinence before marriage, but they also want their kids to know the basic facts of life and how to use birth control. More generally, I think the poll indicates that the more traditional religious parents, be they Muslim or Catholic or Protestant, are concerned about sex and violence in the popular culture; they are concerned about sexuality more generally. As a consequence, they are more likely to teach their kids strategies for remaining chaste throughout their young adult lives. It’s certainly the case that kids from more religious homes are less likely to have sex, and they are less likely to be engaged in sexual activity more generally. But it’s not a silver bullet. Obviously, you see kids having sex as teenagers and before marriage across religious traditions.

One thing I think it’s important to realize when it comes to understanding the role that men play in their families — and I can say this speaking both personally and professionally — is that religion tends to domesticate men. It makes men more likely to focus on the needs of their wives and their children. We know that more religious fathers are more involved and more affectionate with their kids and, in fact, religion seems to matter more for fathers than it does for mothers, because most moms are very involved with their kids. There is more heterogeneity when it comes to dads. Some dads are really involved and some dads are not so involved, and because there is more difference in the levels of paternal involvement, any factor that makes them family-focused will have an impact.

What I find in my work is that religion is more predictive of greater involvement for dads than it is for moms. Religion is one of the few institutions that men encounter in their daily lives that really encourage them to think about their families. At work, in the bar, at Yankee Stadium, men for the most part are not encouraged to think about their families. Whereas if they go to a synagogue on Saturday or to a church on Sunday, they will often hear a message about the importance of loving their kids, the importance of setting aside time for their children. These are reasons why religion is important, particularly for dads, in making them more engaged as parents.

Religion inculcates kids with moral purpose in two ways. One is by providing them with peers and adults who value particular moral norms, but also by giving them a religious rationale for doing something — a sense that there is a God out there who is watching them and who wants them to do the right thing. It’s the faith itself as well as the kinds of peers and adults they encounter in their religious congregation. One interesting thing that we are seeing now in polls is that young adults, teenagers think of God in pretty darn benevolent terms. They think God is a pretty good guy who loves them and cares for them, and they are not that concerned about hell. They are not concerned about eternal damnation. What they do view God as is a kind of a loving figure who is looking out for them, and they want to please him, but there is not this real concern. I think there’s a sense that God is a loving father or a loving parent who is just there to help them and comfort them when they are facing either personal challenges or challenges that they see on the news or in their local communities. There is a strong sense that God offers comfort for teenagers. Many of them view God in therapeutic terms, as someone offering succor or help to them.

Read more of Betty Rollin’s interview on religion, parenting and the RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY poll on Faith and Family in America with Professor Brad Wilcox.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: One of the most difficult religious and ethical questions facing many communities — and often tearing them apart — is how the public schools should educate children about sex.

Some want a comprehensive approach that recommends abstinence but also covers birth control and disease prevention. Others, especially religious conservatives, want abstinence education only. But some say comprehensive sex ed encourages sexual activity, and others feel the abstinence-only approach results in more pregnancy and disease. Lucky Severson examined the dilemma in Lubbock, Texas.

LUCKY SEVERSON: There is one thing all sides of the heated debate over sex education for kids can agree on — the need.

ADAM HERNANDEZ (Student): I think it is hard being our age and being in high school is hard, just not having sex.

Marilyn Morris

SEVERSON: Every day, the battle over how best to educate kids about sex gets more polarized. This is Marilyn Morris. She runs the country’s largest abstinence-only sex education program, called Aim for Success. Today she’s the invited speaker at the Vines High School Abstinence Club near Dallas.

MARILYN MORRIS (Aim for Success) (Talking to Students): Folks, good news: this abstinence thing is huge. It’s moving all across America.

SEVERSON: Aim represents a rapidly growing movement, strongly promoted by President Bush, that the only solution to teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, or STDs, is total abstinence until marriage. No condoms, no sex.

Ms. MORRIS: I think that you have to understand that what we have been doing in America for all 35 years is encouraging comprehensive sex education. And what that did is encourage sexual activity.

SEVERSON: Vilka Scott Kitching takes an opposite view. She is a disease intervention specialist at the Lubbock, Texas health department, and says she sees too many teens with STDs.

VILKA SCOTT KITCHING (Disease Intervention Specialist, Lubbock Health Department): Time and time again we have people in our clinic who come totally unprepared to face a disease of that nature because nobody had spoken to them about the consequences of starting to have sex without any protection.

Ms. MORRIS (Talking to Students): Did you know that every single day in our country, 2,305 teenaged girls get pregnant?

SEVERSON: The good news, according to Marilyn Morris, is that the number of teen pregnancies has been coming down — still, over 800,000 teens get pregnant each year. Morris tells the kids she was one of those statistics, and that’s what motivated her to push abstinence only.

Ms. MORRIS (Talking to Students): If you’re the one it’s happening to, you’d find out like I did, it is a big deal. In fact, it was more like a living nightmare. Here I was, 17. I had all kinds of dreams and goals ahead of me.

SEVERSON: Her message is that abstinence only allows kids to fulfill their dreams without the nightmare of unwanted pregnancy or diseases such as chlamydia.

Ms. MORRIS (Talking to Students): Ready? (sprays card held by student) You don’t have it.

SEVERSON: She dwells on the dangerous and deadly diseases that often go undetected for years.

Ms. MORRIS (Talking to Students): Are you ready? Here we go, 10th-grade guys (sprays card and it turns red).

ED AINSWORTH (Whiteheart Communications) (Talking to Students): How many of you have watched the television show FRIENDS? Raise your hand.

SEVERSON: Ed Ainsworth is another abstinence-only advocate who lecturers nationwide. These are sixth graders at the Ropesville School near Lubbock, Texas.

First, he ridicules the “sex is okay” culture that surrounds today’s teenagers, including prime-time TV programs like the sitcom, FRIENDS.

Mr. AINSWORTH (Talking to Students): Is that TV show about sex? It is about all of them having as much sex as they can with whoever they want to, right?

SEVERSON: He says the first time he had sex was the day he married Connie.

Ed Ainsworth

Mr. AINSWORTH (Talking to Students): If you have sex outside marriage, it will cost you. It may cost you physically with a pregnancy or a disease. It may cost you mentally and emotionally with your reputation. How you feel about yourself. It may cost you spiritually, and I know with my boundaries I can’t talk to you about the spiritual consequences because we are in school. But believe me, young people, there are tons of spiritual consequences.

SEVERSON: Ropesville, like hundreds of school districts across the country, receives federal funding for programs that are almost exclusively abstinence only. Over the past 5 years, the government has spent more than $800 million on such programs. Schools like Ropesville provide no comprehensive sex education, but invite abstinence-only lecturers like Ainsworth to fill the gap.

Mr. AINSWORTH (Talking to Students): I got up this morning and said, “Lord, all I want is one teenager. All I want is one. Help me change one life and I will be a success today.”

SEVERSON: Ainsworth is legally prohibited from mixing religion with his presentations, but like many on the lecture circuit, Ainsworth comes from an evangelical background and says if the kids are like him and have a close relationship with Christ, they’ll stay sexually pure. He has also been a youth pastor for 27 years.

Mr. AINSWORTH (Speaking in Church): It is the will of God that you abstain from sexual impurity until you are married.

They’ve heard me at school, and then they hear me in a church. They tell me in a church it makes way more, much more sense. Why? Because there’s the power behind the message.

SEVERSON: The message, he says, is one reason fewer teens are giving birth in Lubbock, although teen pregnancy started inching down nationwide before abstinence-only education became popular. Meanwhile, Lubbock has experienced an epidemic of gonorrhea and chlamydia. Lubbock disease specialist Vilka Scott Kitching wouldn’t allow her 12-year-old daughter to attend an Ainsworth class because she says she has seen too many patients who had.

Vilka Scott Kitching

Ms. SCOTT KITCHING: They tell us, “Well, this guy came to school and he said condoms don’t work, so, I didn’t use one. But I was going to have sex anyway, so here I am with one, two, three STDs.” But young people eventually do have sex. I would rather they had more comprehensive information about the subject than just say no to it.

SEVERSON: In 2002, some Lubbock high school students grew so alarmed at the surge of sexually transmitted diseases, they requested more sex education in schools — more comprehensive sex education. They were refused.

Erica Vales attended one of Ainsworth’s sessions.

ERICA VALES (Student): Like, he didn’t say anything about birth control. He just said the Bible says abstinence is better until marriage — that was in the assembly we took during school. He told us that.

Mr. AINSWORTH: I am not going to promote the use of condoms and those kinds of things, knowing that a student can listen to me and walk out of here and, albeit their choice, go have sex with someone who has AIDS, and use a condom, and die.

DARLENE WORKMAN (School Nurse, Vines High): I spent eight years handing out the protection. And you know what? They’re too young to be mature enough to use it.

SEVERSON: Darlene Workman is the school nurse at Vines High. She came here after quitting her job as a director of a family planning clinic in Michigan, where they taught comprehensive sex education and handed out condoms.

Darlene Workman

Ms. WORKMAN: One of my students came up to me and said, “Well, Ms. Workman, if you’re handing these out, that means you must think it’s okay for us to participate.” And I never in the world thought it was okay. So what I did was quit.

SEVERSON: One of the first things she did here was start an abstinence-only club. They are becoming increasingly prevalent throughout the country. This is David.

DAVID: When condoms are presented as a way to have safe sex and avoid the ramifications, they do encourage teens to have sex.

Ms. VALES: Well, it will encourage some people, but it will prevent a lot of pregnancies. Or even just telling girls about birth control. Because nobody ever talks about birth control.

SEVERSON: A recent congressional study cast some doubt on the effectiveness of federally funded abstinence-only programs. The study found scientific inaccuracies in many of the textbooks, which, for instance, quote a much higher failure rate of condoms than is the case.

One textbook states that the HIV virus can be transmitted through tears, sweat, and saliva. Not true. Marilyn Morris says the study was biased and politically motivated.

Ms. MORRIS: Because I think they are people who are very, maybe, antireligious. And they looked at the abstinence message as a religious message. But for us, at Aim for Success, it is a health issue.

SEVERSON: Another study found that 88 percent of kids who had taken an abstinence pledge admitted having sexual intercourse before marriage, and that teens who contracted STDs were less likely to realize they had a disease.

Ms. SCOTT KITCHING: The more knowledge you have on the subject, the more equipped you are to handle that subject. If you look at studies in other countries, in Europe where sex education is comprehensive, you can see clearly that their rates are lower than ours.

SEVERSON: And in Texas, the STD rates keep rising steadily.

Ms. WORKMAN: That says we have a lot of work to do. It doesn’t say that we should hand out condoms, to me, at all. I think the churches need to get together. I think the community needs to get together. I think the parents need to take up to the plate — stand up to the plate and take some action here.

SEVERSON: For some kids, the debate and the dilemma come down to this. Can moral arguments persuade them to avoid sex until marriage, or if they’re taught about condoms and safe sex, does that encourage them to have sex? Or is the answer somewhere in the middle?

ABERNETHY: Although major studies are in progress, there are as yet no generally accepted data on the consequences of comprehensive versus abstinence-only sex education.

One of the most difficult questions facing many communities is how the public schools should educate children about sex. Some want a comprehensive approach that recommends abstinence but also covers birth control and disease prevention. Others, especially religious conservatives, want abstinence education only.

]]>Should a pastor offer people any counseling on sex other than to maintain abstinence outside of marriage? Does saying anything about safe sex seem to condone behavior the Bible forbids? It’s a real issue in the deep South, especially in black churches, and especially regarding women.

BOB ABERNETHY (anchor): The AIDS pandemic has killed 17 million persons in Africa; it has created 12 million orphans. In some countries more than a quarter of the adult population is infected. But in Senegal, a largely Muslim country, the rate of infection is barely one percent.

Public health programs get a lot of the credit, but so do personal behavior, and religion. Fred de Sam Lazaro reports.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Senegal has the kind of profile typical of African countries staggering under AIDS. Most of its people are poor, [with] an annual per capita income of just $600, and two-thirds are illiterate. Yet, on a continent where AIDS has infected up to 30% of the population, Senegal’s rate is barely one percent.

The imams in Senegal’s mosques say there’s one important statistic: the country is 95% Muslim, and they are devout. Homosexuality is outlawed by the Qur’an, they note, as is marital infidelity. AIDS in Africa is primarily a disease of heterosexuals.

Mr. ELIMANE NDIAYE (Imam, through translator): Islam is a religion that prohibits sexual deviance — it does not allow taking liberties with your sex life. As a Muslim, you are obligated to choose your wife and stay with her.

DE SAM LAZARO: There’s no question that Senegal’s mosques are filled on Fridays, and life comes to a stand still each day during the calls to prayer.

However, this former French colony also has a thriving commercial sex industry. Prostitution is tolerated — the only condition being that it keep a low profile. Senegal is alone among African nations to not only acknowledge the sex trade, but it’s also taken elaborate steps to regulate it.

In a program that was started way back in 1969 to control sexually transmitted diseases, Senegal began requiring its commercial sex workers, or prostitutes, to register in places like the poly-clinic here in Dakar, and to come in for regular medical checkups. That program is now key to monitoring the spread of HIV in the country.

About 1,000 women are registered at this clinic in the Senegalese capital, Dakar.

Dr. ANTOINE MAHE: So every month, she has to come here for an examination, and if it’s OK, she has a stamp on her carnet. If the police goes to her, [at] her place of prostitution, she has to show her card, and the policeman checks the regularity of her visits.

DE SAM LAZARO: If she does test positive for HIV, she can continue to work, using condoms, it is hoped. Across the world, the sex trade is often the source of sexually transmitted diseases, so public health officials say the surveillance has been invaluable.

DR. SULEYMAN MBOUP (AIDS researcher): I am military by training, I am [a] colonel in the Army, and I think that even in any war, you need to know first your enemy. Knowing the current situation, you can adapt to what you are doing.

DE SAM LAZARO: Mama Bambera became a sex worker eight years ago. She says the registration program has been a huge help, both in health care services and information.

MAMA BAMBERA: This is a really good thing. I’ve learned how to protect myself. I didn’t know anything about AIDS. Now, I am able to get information and to pass it on to people with whom I work and my family members.

DE SAM LAZARO: Professor Suleyman Mboup has studied sex workers in Senegal for 15 years. He says the awareness campaigns have paid off. The infection rate among registered prostitutes is a relatively low 15% and hasn’t increased since the early ’90s.

PROFESSOR MBOUP: We was able to document very high knowledge of this population and some behavior change, very high rate of usage of condom[s]. While when you go to non-registered prostitutes, you have [an] increase of this incidence rate of STI, and you have [a] lower rate of knowledge and usage of condom[s], and also HIV. And so, I think this has been very important factor.

DE SAM LAZARO: The challenge for scientists like Mboup is to reach the so-called clandestine prostitutes, whose number could well rival that of registered sex workers. Because prostitution is socially taboo, many women work outside of the system. Many are also likely [to be] immigrants from surrounding countries.

Public health experts say its difficult to accurately measure what accounts for the low HIV prevalence, whether it’s the sex worker registration, religious conservatism, or other factors. Their big worry, looking ahead, is complacency — dangerous in the face of one of history’s most tenacious epidemics.

For example, in villages like Nomre, people pride themselves on living by Islamic family values. Many here are in polygamous marriages, where, they quickly add, fidelity to one’s spouses is still a basic value. AIDS, they say, is a distant problem.

We spoke with many women in this village. None had ever met a person with AIDS or ever seen a condom. At least, not outside a condom commercial.

UNIDENTIFIED SENEGALESE WOMAN (through translator): Only on television. You see, we have good family values. Being faithful to our husbands is protection enough for us. We’re loyal to each other.

DE SAM LAZARO: However, many men in this village fit into a classic high risk group for HIV. They are men who travel away for extended periods in search of work — prime customers for the commercial sex industry.

That’s what happened to “Amadou,” who said a casual affair caused him to contract the virus. And although his wife has been tested HIV free, Amadou feels condemned as a social pariah. The mosque, he adds, is no refuge.

“AMADOU” (through translator): There are many imams who say that it is written in the Qur’an that people who have adulterous relationships will suffer consequences, like incurable diseases.

DE SAM LAZARO: Religious leaders say they’ll continue to admonish congregants to stick to Quranic teachings as the best prevention, but they insist they don’t condemn those with HIV.

AHMED MANDAME NDIAYE (Louga imam, through translator): When I meet someone who rejects people with AIDS, I remind them that they cannot be sure that the person contracted it by cheating on his wife. There are many other ways to catch AIDS, so we have to be careful. We also have to take into account that, according to the Qur’an, God is most merciful. If a person repents, God will forgive, so who are we to not give assistance to such a person?

DE SAM LAZARO: Still, Amadou, who says he practices safe sex, is not ready too seek help from the imams.

“AMADOU” (through translator): This is very difficult. This a taboo here. If I went to see the imam or a fellow Muslim, they would say, “Okay, this guy was coming here in the mosque, praying with us, but he was a hypocrite. He engaged in bad behavior, shame on him!”

DE SAM LAZARO: Successfully discouraging that so-called “bad behavior” will be key to keeping Senegal out of the path of the AIDS epidemic.

It remains to been seen in a few years whether Senegal’s religious leaders will still mainly be preaching a message of marital fidelity in their efforts to combat AIDS, or whether they’ll be forced to shift emphasis and talk about caring for people who have the virus.

In some African coutries, more than a quarter of the adult population is infected with HIV/AIDS. But in Senegal, a largely Muslim country, the rate of infection is barely one percent./wnet/religionandethics/files/2001/03/aids-senegal-thumb.jpg

LUCKY SEVERSON: Now, the growing faith-based movement for teenage sexual abstinence. As parents, teachers, and politicians debate the role of abstinence in sex education, religious teenagers are making promises to themselves, their parents, and God to delay sexual intercourse until marriage. To date, the Southern Baptist group True Love Waits — a leader in the movement — boasts over one million pledges from youth. The movement is nationwide. We begin our story in Washington, D.C.

On the mall in Washington this past September, a gathering of thousands of kids, high schoolers — not a party or a protest, but a promise to remain pure. These are young Evangelicals.

RICHARD ROSS (Founder, True Love Waits): God, through your generation, has won many battles. But the war is not over. Students, we gather today to call the nation to purity.

SEVERSON: This is Richard Ross, a middle-aged Southern Baptist preacher. In 1994, he founded a growing movement called True Love Waits for teenaged kids. His message — no sexual intercourse until marriage.

ROSS: For teenagers to be bold, standing up for abstinence — yes, that still goes against the grain.

SEVERSON: And, young people are listening.

Undentified Teen Girl: I’ve made a commitment to stay a virgin until I’m married.

SEVERSON: And in Philadelphia, another abstinence rally, another group. This one called Pure Love Alliance, sponsored by the Unification Church, founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

HUNG SU: My name is Hung Su. I’m from New Jersey. I’m 16, and I’m here to promote purity before marriage and fidelity within.

Unidentified Male: I really believe that that’s God’s will. You know, just one. One love, one life, one man, one wife. That’s it.

JAGO GAVIN (Pure Love Alliance): We’re up here trying to say that abstinence is not a boring lifestyle.

SEVERSON: At the Faith Temple Church in Omaha, a ring ceremony. Moms and dads fit a band on the ring finger of their sons and daughters — a constant reminder that “true love waits.”

TERRANCE ENNIS: You can hug her, give her a kiss, tell her goodbye, walk her to the door, give her another kiss, and go home.

SEVERSON: Karnetta Ennis is Terrance’s mom, and a youth minister at Faith Temple.

KARNETTA ENNIS: He’s a handsome young man, and he’s very popular. The girls really love my son. But at the same time, I want to let him know that’s okay. That’s great. But abstinence, your education, God, all those things, should be first.

SEVERSON: Look what kids today are up against — a culture that seems preoccupied with sex. Sex is everywhere.

ROSS: School leaders have been so awed by the problems related to sexuality that they have invited people to come in and speak from a “true love waits” perspective. Even though it is a Christian movement at heart.

SEVERSON: Since 1996, Congress has allocated 50 million dollars annually for community based abstinence programs. And an increasing number of public schools are now replacing comprehensive sex education — which includes abstinence — with courses that teach only abstinence.

Movement leaders keep the momentum going by keeping it light — young and hip, even sexy. This is peer pressure of a different kind.

Unidentified Teen Girl: I think it’s a lot easier to stay abstinent once I’ve joined this alliance.

GAVIN: [I] don’t think of myself as a big geek or a nerd. And you know, I’ve had fun my whole high school [career].

SEVERSON: Jago lives in Chicago’s South Side. He and his five brothers all belong to the Pure Love Alliance, and he leads workshops to spread the message.

GAVIN: I’ve taught in five different schools in the Chicago area. And their reflections show that, you know, all they needed was some positive reinforcement, that positive peer pressure.

SEVERSON: Whatever the reason, the number of teenagers having sexual intercourse has dropped almost ten percent in the last decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

But there are critics of the movement, even in the Bible Belt, who applaud the goal but not the method. They argue that teaching kids abstinence only, without sex education, denies them the information they need — emotionally and physically — to make smart choices.

Debbie Chisolm is the youth minister at the Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas.

DEBBIE CHISOLM: What concerns me more than anything is that a lot of people think that because of the the movement, we don’t need to worry. We have a lot of kids who are having sex, we have a lot of Baptist kids who are having sex. We have a lot of teenagers getting pregnant in our youth groups. Teenagers that signed the cards and now, they’re having babies.

SEVERSON: Debbie and her husband, also a Baptist minister want their three teenage daughters to stay abstinent until marriage. But they also want them to be informed.

MRS. CHISOLM: Sex plays a big part in a marital relationship, so we want to make sure that they feel comfortable with it, and they definitely know we feel comfortable with it. So …

JENNIFER CHISOLM: If you’re gonna have sex, don’t be stupid about it. Melissa is right.

MRS. CHISOLM: Kids need to be educated not just in the diseases that can occur, but also how to use condoms, how to use birth control.

JENNIFER: That’s what they always say. If you’re gonna do it, we can’t stop you, but at least tell us so we can get you birth control.

SEVERSON: A recent Kaiser Foundation report found that most parents want their teenage kids to have more, not less, sex education. A whopping 84% want schools to teach kids about birth control.

MICHELLE MYERS (Pure Love Alliance): The curriculum being taught in public schools is all about comprehensive sex education and all the other alternatives besides abstinence. And I don’t think that empowers young people to make good decisions in their lives. And it’s also devoid of any kind of belief in something higher than themselves.

ROSS: God himself said in Scripture, if you love me keep my commandments. Well, that’s what teenagers want to do. They want to love God. Well, one of the commandments is you don’t fool around until you’re married and that’s what teenagers have agreed [to do].

SEVERSON: Critics argue that abstaining for kids today is a whole lot easier said than done.

MRS. CHISOLM: We’re saying to kids, your sexual interest and your sexual desires are going to get turned on at age 10, and we want you to say no to those until age 35, when you get married. I mean that’s ridiculous.

We have to have physical intimacy with other people, we are created to do that, and [to] deny that is unnatural.

SEVERSON: But these high schoolers and their leaders will tell you, it’s not curbing physical desire that’s powering the abstinence movement, it’s something higher.

GAVIN: Does God want me to go out and use his own children for my own pleasure? No, he doesn’t. You know he wants me to bring up his children to a higher level.

ROSS: It is the sense that I have promised almighty God that I’m not going to have sex until I get married. That’s where the teenagers really find the power and strength to keep that promise.

MS. ENNIS: I’m looking at our nation today, and looking at how gays are standing up for their rights and abortionists are standing up for their rights, so it’s time for us to stand up for ours, and encourage our young people to abstain from sex.

SEVERSON: Still, [there are] no hard facts to prove that the abstinence message works in the long run. But the young people making the promise are fervently convinced that it does, and the movement continues to grow.

“It is the sense that I have promised almighty God that I’m not going to have sex until I get married. That’s where the teenagers really find the power and strength to keep that promise,” says Richard Ross, founder of True Love Waits./wnet/religionandethics/files/2012/06/thumb01-abstinence.jpg